Photos on display at museum

"We're coordinating a time with the committee to get those put up, and I believe the first week of August is when that will happen," Comer City Clerk Missy Queen said.

The photographs will hang in a building attached to Comer City Hall that was upgraded with a $605,000 transportation enhancement grant. The gallery will show the importance of transportation to the city, mostly through the railroad and the automobile.

The building was used in July to host a Madison County Chamber of Commerce gathering as a way to introduce people to the facility, which also will serve as the City Council meeting room and the Municipal Court.

The photos prepared for exhibition will show scenes of mostly downtown Comer, Queen said.

"There are pictures of the old Comer Hotel, a back street full of cotton, a horse and buggy, a picture of Comer High School, Comer Motor Co. -- just different things through history involving some kind of transportation," she said.

Research on the history of the building shows that about 1906 it was used as a livery stable during a day when the horse and buggy was a common mode of transportation, according Steve Sorrells, the town's former city clerk who wrote the grant application.

"At some point in time, we've got a record of it being a sort of general merchandise store and a sign on the exterior south wall indicates that at one time it was a machine shop," Sorrells said.

Sometime in the late 1920s, the Comer Motor Co., which was a Ford dealership, leased the building.

"We're told that Model T's came in crated on the train and they needed some assembly in the building," Sorrells said.

During the 1950s, the building was used to store new vehicles until they could be sold.

"Anybody who was here in that time remembers how during the third week of September, the new cars would be displayed. We're told if a dealer let people view the cars before that particular day, they could lose their franchise," he said, adding that plywood was placed in windows to shield the new models from prying eyes.

Comer Motor Co. moved out of the building in 1984 to a new location west of Colbert and the city of Comer then purchased the building, which was used mostly as a maintenance building.